Complexity of enterprise networks has increased to a point where even information technology (IT) administrators may not have a clear picture of the network utilization of the enterprise network. Enterprise networks are increasingly moving towards a combination of on-premise and cloud-based infrastructure, making the ability to determine computing and storage resources associated with business-related application more difficult.
Corporations demand acceptable levels of performance, reliability, redundancy, and security from its computing and storage devices. One way to achieve performance, reliability, and redundancy is to provide more resources than the computing environment would ever need. Unfortunately, the cost of IP equipment, software and personnel can be prohibitively expensive, and would run contrary to an overall goal of an enterprise of profitability. Every corporation must strike a balance between their the cost of additional computing and storage versus performance, reliability and redundancy benefits of the additional computing and storage resources.
One way for IT administrators to monitor aspects of the increasingly complex enterprise network is with assistance from a wide variety of standalone and integrated software tools available to aid in the monitoring various aspects of the enterprise network. However, in traditional network monitoring systems, the IT administrator may need to configure the network monitoring system. The configuration may include notifying the network monitoring system of elements of the switch fabric (such as switches or routers) to monitor, the version of the monitoring software integrated into the switches, and the metrics that the network monitoring software will output.
As the enterprise networks get increasingly complex, routers or other elements of the switch fabric may be left out of the configuration of the network monitoring system. The disadvantage of these traditional network monitoring systems is that by manually informing the monitoring system the switches or routers to observe, the real potential bottlenecks of the network may be missed. Furthermore, each software tool, whether standalone or integrated, may have a vested interest in protecting their intellectual property, and not allowing their respective software to share information with others. In addition, by informing the network monitoring system of the metrics of interest, the “bigger picture” may be missed.
Further, each of the variety of traditional network monitoring systems available to a user of the enterprise network may provide data relevant only to a specific device, or type of device, making it difficult to obtain a complete view of data traffic.
For example, when a user complains of slow response of a virtual desktop application of the enterprise network, the IT administrator may run a diagnostic using a network monitoring system to determine the routers and switches connecting the physical servers, cloud servers and storage devices on using network performance monitoring tools. The network performance monitoring tools may determine that performance issues exist on the switch fabric of the enterprise network. A common solution to the issue may be to increase the number of routers and switches of the enterprise network in order to increase the bandwidth capacity. Increasing the number of routers and switches, however, may not result in an improvement in response time of the virtual desktop application. The monitoring system connected to the router may not be able to pin point a reason for the slow response of the virtual desktop application since this software would only have access to traffic data on specific routers, and not the performance of other entities that impact performance of the virtual desktop application. For example, the reason for the slow response of the virtual desktop application may be a particular server connected to a router associated with performance of a VDI application. That particular server may be taking up the utilization bandwidth of the router. The network performance monitoring tool may not be able to identify the server as impacting performance and, as such, the reason for the slow response of the virtual desktop application is actually obscured.